Lovecraft Event Part 1

Fundamentally, my position comes down to the nonadmission of chaos as the ultimate referential figure of the universe.
Alain Badiou (“Matters of Appearance” 322)

The Lovecraft event is the result of a singular knotting of art, science, and politics that produces a new materialist fiction of chaos. Lovecraft writes:

The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space and matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality – when it must be ratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible and mensurable universe. And what, if not a form of non-supernatural cosmic art, is to pacify this sense of revolt – as well as to gratify the cognate sense of curiosity? (Lovecraft xvi)

Abandoning a semi-mystical discourse of contradiction, which would oppose another “weird” world to this one, Lovecraft insists on the supplemental and non-supernatural form of his art. These supplements do not contradict the laws of the known universe but they suspend them to re-inscribe chaos within law (prefiguring the work of Quentin Meillassoux).

To achieve this suspension of the law Lovecraft forces a pass through the avant-gardes of his time, in both art and science. The key text in which Lovecraft provides a kind of “manifesto” of this forcing is “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928). This point arrives reaches saturation in Lovecraft’s description of Cthulhu’s “home” – the ancient and alien city of R’lyeh:

Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces – surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention this talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He has said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. (Lovecraft 165-6)

What we find here is the precise combination of avant-garde art (futurism) with avant-garde mathematics (non-Euclidean) as the resources for the figuration of horror.

In the case of Futurism Lovecraft could not be further from the Italian Futurists enthusiastic endorsement of the new machine age and longing for a new type of “biomechanical man,” which can be found in a work like that of the second-generation Futurist Tullio Crali’s “Nose Dive on the City” (1939). While Lovecraft does not share this machine aesthetic he does share the Futurists’ anti-humanism and materialism. This link is most evident in the Futurists’ more cubist fragmentation of the body, such as in Severini’s self-portrait of 1912. In this image the figure of the face and body is broken down into multiple perceptual planes that disrupt the coherence of the face in particular – exploding it. This rupturing or expansion of human perception is typical of Lovecraft’s own references to alien realms “crowded with indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance” and composed of “clusters of cubes and planes” (“Dreams” 118).

This gesture of fragmentation is reinforced by Lovecraft’s reference to the non-Euclidean geometries discovered by Gauss, Lobatchevsky, and Bolyai in the 19th Century. In the words of the historian of mathematics Morris Kline: “[i]t is fair to say that no more cataclysmic event has ever taken place in the history of thought” (Kline 478). This cataclysm is the result of severing the link, supposed by Kant for example, between Euclidean geometry and the actual geometry of the physical world. The fact that non-Euclidean geometries could be valid descriptions of physical space forced the slow recognition that Euclidean geometry was simply a system of thought, different from physical space. This also problematised the accepted truth status of Euclid’s axioms; these axioms were “true” but they were not the fundamental or absolute truth of the physical universe. Lovecraft would exploit this “cataclysm” in the cause of horror – with the non-Euclidean as “abnormal”: while the accepted truth of Euclidean geometry is that the sum of the angles of any triangle always equals 180°, for the non-Euclidean geometry of Bolyai and Lobatchevsky this sum is always less than 180° and for Riemann’s geometry always greater than 180°.

In “The Dreams in the Witch-House” (1933) Lovecraft actually cast a student mathematician named Gilman as his unlikely hero. With amusing understatement the story states:

Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension.
(“Dreams” 113-114)

Quite so. This quotation shows how Lovecraft integrates science with horror to demonstrate that his horrors have a scientific basis, with occult texts providing “terrible hints” (“Dreams” 114) of the new quantum order of reality – in the “suspension” of physical “laws” (at least in the mechanistic form of Lovecraft’s own materialism).

References (Part 1)
Alain Badiou, “Matters of Appearance: Interview with Lauren Sedofsky.” Artforum XLIV 9 (2006): 246-253, 322.
Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987)
H. P. Lovecraft. “The Dreams in the Witch-House.” In At the Mountains of Madness (St. Albans, Panther: 1968), pp.113-148
H. P. Lovecraft. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. Ed. and Intro. S. T. Joshi (London: Penguin. 1999).

The University

IT with some thoughts on what the university is (good) for (avoiding Jacques-Alain Miller's Maoist phase argument 'absolutely nothing' - strangely the French government thought that might conflict with his role as a university academic). In so many of the situations of the new bureaucracy this comment from Žižek comes to mind: ‘in a bureaucracy caught in the vicious cycle of jouissance, the ultimate crime is to simply and directly do the job one is supposed to do’

(‘Odradek as a Political Category’, Lacanian Ink 24 / 25 (Winter / Spring 2005): 136-155, p.140).

The Horror, The Horror

For those not sated by Collapse IV Reza has a very fair-minded review of the issue coupled to a revised version of the paper he was kind enough to provide for the booklet for one of the weird event days at Goldsmiths. In particular I find these comments are valuable:

"Ironically nothing has been more disastrous for thinking horror than the overabundance of vacuous cruelties or absurd maladies; for it is relatively easy to mimic a battlefield, a bodily decomposition in a text, image or music. If horror is already everywhere, or in other words, if horror has already been culminated, thinking horror can easily turn into a case study, counting its countless manifestations."

"There is something profoundly wrong and terrible with humans"

"The openness of humans toward horrors is inevitably an economical venture for mining that which is affordable."

I hope to post a short series on Lovecraft that was distributed for one of the weird events shorn of their Lacanian elements. They provide a little clearer context for my paper in Collapse IV and indicate a rather primitive attempt to coordinate the political with a naturalism of horror.

Sharpen the Contradictions

This new post by Steven Shaviro speaks closely both to the conjuncture and my concerns in my ongoing book project The Persistence of the Negative. I share his scepticism concerning the symmetry between absolute pessimism and voluntarism / subjectivism, although, as I'll hopefully be elaborating at length, I would argue for a negativity that precisely acts on the ontological fabric of capitalism qua real abstractions. Such a negativity would not cultivate the subject or restore it as spectacle, in fact I'm not sure negativity can be entirely correlated with the subject at all (this is a speculative, not to say unsubstantiable, argument...).

It is worth reading Shaviro's post alongside Gregory Elliott's remarkable (although also very expensive) Ends in Sight (2008). Elliott too makes the point that Marx's success as analyst of capitalism means little when cut off from possible agency to destroy it. Contrary his earlier more sceptical discussion of Perry Anderson (in The Merciless Laboratory of History) now Elliott comes around to Andersonian pessimism. As he puts it in his conclusion, regarding the alter-globalisation movement, 'The cruces of an alternative - agency, organisation, strategy, goal - that could command the loyalties and energies of the requisite untold millions await anything approaching resolution.' (p.111)

This pessimism feeds into a query prompted by the fascinating paper by Nick Gray and Rob Lucas: "Formal and Real Subsumption - Logical or Historical Categories?" at the Marxism and Philosophy day. They quoted Jacques Camatte's argument that real subsumption absolishes formal mediations (unions, the welfare state, the parties of the third international; all 'positive' conceptions of the proletariat) and so leads to a sharpening of antagonism. What, however, if its doesn't? Perhaps this situation accounts for the oscillation noted above: in the absence of the mediating instances (no matter how flawed) and without the sharpening of antagonism oscillation between voluntarism and pessimism become 'structural' features. Badiou's work of the 1970s, soon to be issued by re.press, is relevant here as he traces the symmetry between Althusserian structuralism and the voluntarism of Gauche Prolétarienne.

Correlationism Ha Ha Ha

By materialism we understand above all acknowledgement of the priority of nature over 'mind', or if you like, of the physical level over the biological level, and of the biological level over the socio-economic and cultural level; both in the sense of chronological priority (the very long time which supervened before life appeared on earth, and between the origin of life and the origin of man), and in the sense of the conditioning which nature still exercises on man and will continue to exercise at least for the foreseeable future. Cognitively, therefore, the materialist maintains that experience cannot be reduced either to a production of reality by a subject (however such production is conceived) or to a reciprocal implication of subject and object. We cannot, in other words, deny or evade the element of passivity in experience: the external situation which we do not create but which imposes itself on us. Nor can we in any way reabsorb this external datum by making it a mere negative moment in the activity of the subject, or by making both the subject and the object mere moments, distinguishable only in abstraction, of a single effective reality constituted by experience.

Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism (1975), p.34

This is not to simply make a rather vacuous point of intellectual priority, and neither is it to deny the way in which Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude offers a devastating 'internal' ruination of correlationism. It is, however, to signal a certain number of anxieties I have concerning his work and its take up.

1. The anxiety that renaming his speculative materialism as speculative realism is a sign (admittedly minor) of de-politicisation. This is reinforced by the tendency to dissociate Meillassoux from Badiou.
2. The uninhibited lumping in of all Marxism with correlationism. This was the point of my fortunately tiny intervention in the debate on Speculative Realism recorded in Collapse III. While Timpanaro was fighting against Hegelian and Platonic interpretations of Marxism, and his work is a minor and not unproblematic current (I especially have my doubts concerning his critique of Freud), he at the minimum signals difficulties with this maneuver.
3. Certainly so-called materialisms can merely amount to inverted idealisms - erecting one type of matter above all others in the function of an ideal. This point was made long ago by Bataille and commented on here. When Graham Harman re-insists on the point it seems to me to veer dangerously close to excluding Marxist forms of materialism for problems which haunt many (even all?) materialisms.
4. Meillassoux's article 'Spectral Dilemma' in Collapse IV compounds these issues. On a cursory reading, which I realise is not philosophically acceptable, the article seems to me to use his radicalised reading of contingency to rehabilitate ethics and theology ('inexistent God' yes, but...) towards a new irrationalism. Robin was kind enough to position my very poor article as a critical response despite it being written without awareness of Meillassoux's piece.
5. To choose just one example from those lumped in as correlationists - the most deeply unfashionable - isn't Derrida's quasi-concept of the 'trace' resistant to simple characterisation as correlated to the human subject?